Demon's Souls Successor Project Dark Becomes Dark Souls

Demon's Souls is an incredibly challenging role playing game which released in late 2009 exclusively on PlayStation 3. While it never became a household name, Demon's Souls has a pretty large and extremely dedicated cult following who still play the game to this day, because it's fun to get the shit kicked out of you and lose all your 'souls'.

Well, not too long ago, a spiritual successor to Demon's Souls was announced. Developers From Software didn't release many details aside from the working title, Project Dark. As of today, we can begin filling in some of the details we never received.

The project is now rightfully named Dark Souls. It will maintain the level of frustratingly delicious difficulty its predecessor had. The premise of the game remains, though the story and the world have no tie in with Demon's Souls. Instead of being broken up into different areas -- which required zoning and a nice, long load time -- the world will be one, big, open playground of the dead.

Character creation is intact, however choosing a job when creating your character doesn't make the jump. No big loss there, the job system didn't seem to make much sense to me anyway. As with most sequels, the selection of weapons, armor, and magic skills will be expanded. I expect all good treasure to be almost impossible to acquire, in classic Demon's Souls fashion.

The online aspect of Demon's Souls will carry over, though in what capacity has yet to be finalized. You will still be able to leave notes to warn future adventurers of forthcoming dangers. However no mention was made of player summoning or PvP world invasion. Also it seems like the world tendency changes have been scrapped.

Dark Souls is slated to release later this year, as a PS3 exclusive in Japan, and for both PS3 and Xbox 360 in the west. 360 owners can thank Namco Bandai for finally being able to get in on the anger-inducing fun.

via Siliconera